Lossy compression for DNG files

One of the problems I have with the amount of photos I retain from a shoot, is the amount of space taken up with each DNG file. I know some photographers convert finished files to jpeg once they feel there is nothing left to do with the shot.

However with the upgrade from Lightroom 3 to Lightroom 4, features were enhanced, such as the Clarity slider which no longer produces a halo effect. to that end then I would never jpeg a shot.

My Canon550d produces CR2 files at around 20-22 meg a shot. Converting to DNG brings them down to 15-18meg. I have noticed a steady decrease in the amount of space I have on my data drives. This is because of the panoramic shots I do. Once completed the resulting Tiff file can reach over a gig in size, that’s also using LZW compression with a no layers from Photoshop.

I heard of the lossy compression for other file types and was worried that I would loose far to much data. Then I thought of the types of files I would use this on, the panoramic images.

I was stunned by the lack of noticeable degradation of the image quality once converted, also the file size was incredible. From a file size of 1gig it would drop down to about 400meg.

I know that hard drives space increases as prices drop but every little helps.